


Move Into the Sun

by orphan_account



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Not necessarily a fix-it fic but something resembling it superficially, Pacific Rim: Uprising Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-17 08:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14185041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The repetition of old dramas following another round of apocalyptic forestalling, the salvaging of a trisected mind caving to its interdimensional colonizers, the bureaucratic business of reparations, and people just trying their goddamned best. A story about unlearning and relearning, making up for ten lost years, and the future.





	1. Intro in Blue and Green

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PuffinParty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PuffinParty/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ten years and a second aborted invasion later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story title comes from Wilfred Owen's Futility, a poem about a fruitless attempt to revive a felled soldier. This should not be taken as an indicator of the tonal direction of the rest of this story. In my experience, redemption narratives sometimes cannot help but be somber (and this story will deal with some upsetting subject matter, including trauma, meditations on self-annihilation, and other themes mostly put down by the source material) but the intention here is to put out the opposite. As close to a fix it as I can get. The intention is to entertain myself, and you, wherever you are, taking the time to read this.

The blue horizon begins to frighten him. 

Somewhere in the single great continent that became of the war-torn Pacific, the bygone principalities and bearers of military might begin to emerge to claim ascendancy, jostling the stateless PPDC around in the manner of pieces displaced across a chessboard. The world eddies, caught in a sustained cresting of shock and grief and relief that seem to surge interminably, knocking the driftwood of its survivors around in an intercontinental flurry of beautiful toxic delphinium blue, deep sea bioluminescent blue, Kaiju Blue, nuclear and gunmetal blue. Blue as the holographic slide of the Drift, blue as the distant glow of the Breach, blue as this strange planet packed with all these humans and their rock of minerals and froth of toxic air, blue as the halation of the lost glories of a vanished era forever shrinking as the world twists forward. 

In somebody’s mind, fixed systems begin to collapse. Danger from within and without, in the polyphonic rattle of three voices, independent, incoherent, clamoring for ascendancy. Rather, two voices plus an infinitely coalescing hive mind.

In sleep he is caught in a grille reaching for the light, rising from a wave to snap at a stretch of a red steel superstructure, trapped in a torpid room aching to fly over the never-ending upslope of the Eastern steppe, razing steel and concrete to spill the ransacking saltwater bordering a city of towers and arches, scaling the keys of an electronic clavier to fill the dead air with a solemn aria, snaking the half-moon scar of the Pacific floor and feeling the quiver of energy pulsing from the planet’s very core. In the archipelagic scatter of his trisected self a blue shimmer emerges, ghostlike, delighting in the wretchedness of a single spinning cosmic rock with its pale blue halo cracking and just about to give way.

He could hear some former exobiologist’s prevarications, just as he could hear the hungry rumble of something large and alien and possessed. They clatter in the back of his mind: the roar of the ocean, the nervous tautologies of some tattooed idiot savant, the biding chill of a reckoning that all survivors bear like a parapodic spine crawl, backed by revelation, by intuition, by hunger. As mysterious as the truth-bearing air of the aleph, as potent as the insistent beat of an inter-dimensional door knock—eschatological fear, apocalyptic drive, diasporic ache transiting the snarled alluvial avenues of his mind.

Precisely the kind of dreams that made Hermann Gottlieb more than envy the dead, most days. His ears ring with a shrill chalk-slide pressing down an infinitely ascending plane, not to impress any mathematical substantiation. No, just the primal grip of a deep and relentless terror.

They’ve kept out the kaiju again, but the Earth’s entire surface begins to feel like something with the dubious constitution of the Anti-Kaiju Wall. 

This time there are no spontaneous bursts of euphoria to ravage the PPDC. Only cautious relief set to the low-frequency thrumming of bureaucratic conventions, the circuitous negotiations on the matter of culpability following devastating counts of property destruction and casualties, the matter of fabricating a palatable press release for the public, and the inevitable circulation of rumors in and out of the base. 

He’s probably doomed to be forever associated with any incidences effected by one Doctor Newton Geiszler. Or maybe he shouldn’t have come to his defense in the first place. Hermann gets as far as accusing a multinational corporation's entire research and development fleet of negligence before he’s forcibly removed from the meeting. The last thing he sees is Liwen Shao’s reddened face, possibly suppressing the thorough dressing-down he’s due. Then the door slams right in his face.

The manic part of him—the one with a history of speaking out of turn and pitching over tables—steps back to give him a long, derisive slow clap. It echoes, despite the absence of an actual sound wave. 

Then the door opens. He doubles back instinctively, bracing for a caustic admonition nobody is present to give.

Marshal Pentecost hasn’t yelled at Newton Geiszler in ten years.

And he is not Newton Geiszler.

Lambert steps out and practically shoves him into the med bay, warning him about the possibility of a collusion investigation if he’s not careful. He doesn’t appreciate the confrontational nature of the psych review he becomes subject to, but it does get Hermann to consider the absurd, baseless certainty that only faith—in all its illogical, indiscriminate reverence—could ever shore up. Or perhaps pity, and the gut churn of dread. Were he in Newton’s position, he might have done much the same. Or not. There’s no way to find out now, is there?

They have Newton quarantined, sedated, wheeled into a sealed cylindrical chamber like one of his old specimens, in the company of a rotation of psychiatrists, medical attachés, brass-voiced servicemen specializing in _enhanced interrogation_ with a manner about them that Hermann cannot help but mistrust. He attempts to bury himself in busywork, purposefully evading the makeshift detainee wing, despite some unnamable urge steering him right to it any moment he’s halfway caught in the daze of sleep. He catches a glimpse of Newton just once, noting that he is alive, unharmed, asleep, and decides that this information, for now, should satisfy.

His lab piles up with duplicates of Newton’s records at Shao, the inexhaustible research developed with K-science, the vessels of formaldehyde-steeped viscera previously laid to one side of a bisected lab, and the disassembled wreckage of a makeshift Pons interface from a decade ago. The gleaming wall tiles, the folders and the reprints, containers of kaiju parts laid altar-like, the holographic interface all coat the lab in a sweep of the precise blue pigment that’s come to dog Hermann the last ten years.

The Pacific starts to feel like a gaping maw. Or a beacon, calling him home. There are three voices in his head, and he’s not sure which one is his.

* * *

 

A century and a half ago, the Japanese introduced kudzu to resist erosion in the American Deep South. Patches of restorative green vine, with its curious lavender honey and tendril flowers, sinking its teeth into whole cities, concrete and steel and brownstone sinking under the weight of a viridescent invasion. His skin feels invaded. His brain too, but he’s beginning to like it. Rather, he’s beginning to acclimatize to the complex colonial dynamics of sharing a single nervous territory with an inexhaustible resource of physics, statistics, quantum mechanics, robotics, aerospace engineering, and the boundless monolith of a single mind, split into inestimable war vessels, born but built, individual and collective. He’s out of his league here. Nothing else to be done but yield to the cosmic fastness of the silent lees of his mind.

He can’t remember how he got here.

He remembers standing atop the mangled scaffolding of the Sydney Wall. The rest is a blur. The salted scent of the ocean, the toe of his boots hovering past the edge. No choral anthem, no string aria cresting to a final recapitulation, just the sound of the roaring water. Just the phantom echo of the Drift. One final brutal engagement for sovereign command over the hand on the lever of his motor functions.

He should jump.

He can’t jump.

Maybe Hermann could fix him. Mako could kick the shit out of him until it all goes away. Maybe he has jumped. Maybe he’s dead.

The world spins on toward a new attempt at another restructuring. The post-invasion calm is only about to settle, but already Newton Geiszler’s body begins fine-tuning the clockwork machinery for a Second Coming, with an alarming alacrity. Elsewhere, his consciousness remains in its temporal residence here, on the southeastern coast of Australia, close to the sky, close to pitching over straight to the water, trapped in the asymptotic purity of his despair.

Mental discord is not new to him, but it’s clear this will not be one of those temporary inconveniences. Rather, has not been. Where is he? What day is it?

Ten years is a long time to be wading in the void.

He let the Kaiju take over his skin. Now they’re everywhere else. Funny, how things turn out.

His consciousness comes back to him in snatches. He tries to blink Morse at a stranger in a conference, once. He drops a joke about it in a radio interview and instinctively buries the lede. He leaves the PPDC because he is a danger to them. No, he leaves because the Precursors pull the strings. He aggressively avoids any sort of contact with Hermann, who they will _take_ , with Mako, who will notice, with Beckett and Hansen and anybody else likely to catch on. He might kill them. Rather, the Precursors might kill them. With his hands, so what’s the difference, really?

Prying perfectly operational systems apart and putting them back another way comes easily to him. He reworks the algorithmic motions of a fully automated production line to a rhythm matched only by the phantom hand arrogating to itself his very central command system. His mind rolls back all the way to the controlling dictates of a patriarch taking to his life, his choices, his career trajectory, shifting him from aeronautics to pure mathematics, eventually coercing all the way into the inescapable presence of some diminutive shrieking ersatz intellectual wannabe rock star until he comes back to and realizes he has been appropriating somebody else’s history. There have been no German cabinet ministers directly governing Newton Geiszler’s life. None that he knows of, anyway.

Three identities split off and collapse and superpose into a single plane. Then the plane stretches to something vast and limitless and of unified purpose. There’s nothing peaceful about the drive to effect inter-dimensional chaos, but somehow, something about the certainty of their intention seems to impress upon him a calm, as silent as mirror-smooth waters.

But now it’s over. The Precursors have lost. In some baffling, repulsive sense, he feels that he, too, has lost. Now he’s in a cell, strapped to a chair, shouting empty threats at whoever will come in. They stick him with electrodes, they extract blood, they flood the cell with shrill music, flashing deep red strobes for hours. Military procedure hasn’t changed much, it seems. Funny. Gross. Primitive. Right now, mostly kind of funny.

He shields his eyes with his sleeve, waiting for the strobe to die out. He pays attention to the pattern on his arms, green, mangled, inhuman. 

He remembers trying to kill Hermann. He doesn’t know what's become of that.

If he were a better man, he’d have jumped years ago.


	2. Left Brain, Right Brain, Front Brain, Hind Brain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A large floating brain and a bottle of gin.

The Shao transport arrives exactly on the dot. Not late. Not early. Punctual. Precise. Perfect.

The cylinder marked Alice is hoisted down from a chopper onto the airfield, hoist ropes creaking from the strain of her heft. The door slides and Liwen Shao steps out, red-soled heels first, signaling for an escort to roll Alice straight into the service lift as she walks the straight white line of paint leading up to the hangar. She spots her host from the other end, stepping closer, expertly crossing the ceaseless flow of the PPDC’s operations, passing the intersecting four-wheel buggies, the cadets on their jogging path, and the automated cargo carriers without breaking stride. Her host bows in acknowledgement. From behind, she hears the bifold doors close with a dramatic hiss. She pauses to asses the uncharacteristic bearing of Doctor Hermann Gottlieb, noting the apologetic hunch of his shoulders, the end of his cane digging into the tile, the stiffness of his outstretched hand.  

“Miss Shao, I owe you an apology,” he says. “For my unprofessional behavior during the postmortem. I don’t know what came over me, but it won’t happen again.”

Liwen takes the hand and gives it a single firm shake. “Apology accepted,” she says simply, the unplanned softness of her tone betraying the hard expression she’d intended to sustain for the entire duration of her commitment to the PPDC.

Gottlieb nods, gestures for her to proceed, and they walk. They get from the lift to the currently empty lab in silence. They’ve placed the kaiju brain right at the center of the space, hovering portentously in the oil-gleam of bright blue formaldehyde. Liwen keeps a wide berth, arms folded over her chest, examining the cylinder with a circumspect eye both to the suspended specimen and to the mathematician across.

Gottlieb lays a palm on the glass. For a moment, his eyes and mouth crinkle with a tenderness, immediately shifting into an expression of overt disgust. It reminds her of Geiszler encountering fresh samples of kaiju viscera. Her mind scrawls a mental markup to warn Lambert about keeping a close eye on their esteemed research lead.

Then, apropos of nothing, Gottlieb turns around to sob into his sleeve. If this were Geiszler, she’d tell him to get a grip. She lifts her purse and pulls out a sheer handkerchief, instead.

Gottlieb snaps out of it and shakes his head. “I’m terribly sorry,” he stutters out. “It must be the exhaustion.”

Liwen keeps her gaze to the giant floating brain. “My team retrieved this from his bedroom. According to his notes, its name is Alice,” she says. “He told me Alice was the name of his wife.”

“That’s exceptionally odd. Even for him.” Then, Gottlieb raps his cane at the container's metal edge, in exasperation. “Well, clearly it wasn’t him,” he follows. And then, possibly for good measure, or more likely for reassurance, he repeats himself. “It wasn’t him. That wasn’t Newton." 

“Whoever it was, he infiltrated our entire development and assembly process undetected. You were right to question my company’s diligence.” 

“I know.”

“I do not wish to see this kaiju brain anymore.”

“All right.”

“And I need a drink.”

Gottlieb stares in apparent shock, afterwards ducking out of the lab and disappearing for several minutes. Liwen stares at her watch and weighs out the pros and cons of removing her shoes. Lab residue on her toes. Bare feet are unbecoming. But the heels are beginning to hurt. She looks down to regard the blood red sole.

Gottlieb comes back with a squat glass bottle, black with a white diamond label, plus two paper cups.

They perch themselves on one of the cargo lifts overlooking the row of jaegers due for repairs. They discuss the long, colorful history of the PPDC’s decorated J-tech and K-science division, their comparable experiences of acquiescing to the dictatorial demands of their individual patriarchs, the burnout and regeneration and re-burnout and re-regeneration cycle of the rare privilege and burden of straddling multiple disciplines. The exact moment they first heard about the San Francisco attack. The last shatterdome, at the edge of Hong Kong. Liwen can picture the bisected lab, chalk dust and the perfume of paper to one fastidiously kept end, clashing with the labyrinthine tangle of pulsating viscera to another, like a children’s picture book interpretation of the human brain’s left and right hemispheres.

Gottlieb’s drink looks, tastes, and smells like some sort of clear ointment. Or some sort of corrosive substance. Whatever it is, it is surprisingly effective at wearing out her personal distaste for over-sharing and an attendant self-consciousness over a lack of eloquence, by her own estimation.

Then they sit back, crushing their cups together, watching the clockwork rhythm of human activity below.

After nearly a quarter hour of companionable silence, they’re graced by the lumbering presence of the late marshal Pentecost’s son.

“Gottlieb, there you are,” Pentecost huffs.

Gottlieb twists his head around in the inappropriately comical manner of a four-string puppet. “Yes?” He answers.

“We need you to step the hell in for interrogations before I beat the fuck out of Newt.” Then, he stops, squints as if to make an assessment of their state—their feet dangling over the platform, the treacherous redness of their faces, the paper cups and the dark gleaming bottle. “Are we getting turnt, is that what’s happening here? How did you even get that stuff in?”

Gottlieb waves his hand indifferently. “Special circumstances. For medicinal purposes.”

“He told me he needs to drink whenever he is upset,” Liwen follows. A laugh nearly bubbles out of her.

Pentecost perches himself on the spot beside Gottlieb, stooping down to examine the bottle. “Man, one that is contraband, two that’s the textbook definition of alcoholism,” he says. “This is some posh gin you’ve got, Doc. Anyway, I need a drink too. The day I’ve had.”

Gottlieb hands the bottle over with a stiff outstretched hand. “Be my guest, ranger Pentecost.”

They pass the bottle around, drinking the remainder of its contents straight out. Gottlieb finishes his story about the last days of the Hong Kong shatterdome. The Drift compatibility tourneys, the contraband keyboard and scooter in the lab that was half his, the late marshal’s habitual singling out of the last two remaining personnel of the K-science division during long mandatory briefings, Geiszler for needless impudence, Gottlieb purely by association. Pentecost takes out a packet of Oreos from his jacket, takes one, and passes the packet on.

“How is he?” Gottlieb asks, vaguely. His eyes follow the crane hauling up a portion of Saber Athena’s arm.

“Real piece of work,” Pentecost responds, rolling his eyes. There seemed to be an eternal eye-rolling in him, Liwen thinks. He chews the rest of his cookie in exaggerated exasperation. “He’s shit, mate. Can’t get anything out of him."

“Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“He’s been quoting Oppenheimer at me. Has he always been this pretentious or is that the Precusors, you think?”

Gottlieb waves a hand in dismissal. “That’s entirely him.”

“So, the big kaiju brain in your lab…” Pentecost says, shifting gears.

Liwen tunes out of the conversation, keeping her attention to the motions of Saber Athena’s ongoing repairs. She clutches at the empty bottle on her lap, latching on to its reassuring weight, the smooth slide of its dark finish taking her back to the last few moments of an Earth without kaiju. The forever polished clavier of her childhood home, her immaculately kept black buckled shoes, Lai Fu perched by the bench, dark soft fur tickling the edge of her socks. They kept an electronic keyboard in one of the break rooms, because its presence had comforted her, but she'd counterintuitively evaded any inveiglements for a performance, except for that one time Geiszler insisted, sussing out what he called _the knack_ , somehow getting her to hammer out the somber glide of the Toccata from Bach’s Partita No. 6 to a thankfully uncritical audience of one. He’d said something about how she reminded him of the inventor of the Pons interface, from her musical aptitude to the sartorial eccentricities. Then he’d detailed Lightcap's death from the side-effects of her own devices that she'd belatedly realized was possibly his way of expressing concern for her wellbeing. Or not. Liwen wonders how deeply he’d already been in the Precursors’ grip, by that point. 

Affable people are rare, she considers. Especially in the eternal tremor of the ravaged world, where people are either too quick to trust or resolutely circumspect to the point of paranoia. Gottlieb seems affable. But then again, Geiszler was affable, too. Perhaps she pities Gottlieb. If there’s anything she’s learned, it’s to distrust any feelings of tenderness or pity, and especially not for people forever followed by the floodlights of controversy.

She tries to focus on the memory of a perfectly performed Toccata, instead.


	3. On the Futility of Playing a Game of Go Against an Infinitely Coalescing Hive Mind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here lies Newton Geiszler, on his nth round of eulogizing for an audience of one, not counting the infinitely vast, unfathomable hive mind in possession of his motor functions.

In the archipelagic scatter of Newton Geiszler's mind, something rises from the water. A single memory, crisp and clear. 

As early as the age of ten, he had found himself dogged by a malignant obsession: the search for an absolute, unimpeachable truth, vouchsafed to him by the divine hand of mathematics, the very framework underpinning the vast, ever expanding, ever mysterious universe.

Or… No, hold up. Wait a second. That doesn’t sound quite right.

He, Newton _—they, I, the collective I, all-seeing eye, consummate victor, destroyer of stars, conqueror of worlds, look upon these feeble territories, helpless vermin, these bloodsack motes with their naive zest, hauling their explosives in small fragile hands, fumbling in their self-annihilating machinery, careening blindly into the endless surf with their deficient calculations, their abstractions and their inoperative theories, they with the futility of their earthly efforts and their bleeding research grants, who cannot fathom this most glorious of intentions, this everlasting great work of a cosmic restructuring, the beauty, the freedom, the madness, the power!_

Newton opens his eyes and sees only a cosmically vast pitch black nothingness.

He might as well be dead. On the plus side, he can step back and say well what’s one fuck up in the face of the slow, eventual heat death of the universe? Well. It is a pretty big fuck up, this. This being his hand setting to motion an irreducible Markov chain of cataclysmic fuck up states on an interplanetary scale. Interplanetary and interdimensional. As immeasurable as the kaiju hive mind.

He might as well be dead.

Here lies Jonah in the belly of the whale, carried through the heaving sea in the body of an unknowable beast, foiled by his own inability to just stick to the goddamned plan. Here lies Prometheus, in his eternal torment, damned for setting fire to deeply entrenched ideological monoliths in the face of certain destruction by the hands of an infinitely replicated horde of exobiological weapons of mass destruction. Here lies Ahab and Frankenstein and other nonexistent men driven to madness, to destruction, to eternal stasis by their own obsessive pursuits.

Here lies Newton Geiszler, forever trapped in the unsanctioned cosmological shifting of the spectral lines of his mind.

Sort of, yes, that’s sort of the case. Less dramatic, but more or less the same.

He has always had a knack for dismantling and reassembling any sort of apparatus with a definite function. Not that he had a definite function. Has, rather—mustn't forget, he's still here. Six doctorates in and its the coming of the end of days, of all things, that obliges him to persist in a single field, to pursue it relentlessly, because of course the literal survival of his whole entire species takes precedence over unappeasable intellectual appetite, an unswayable verve, all while tolerating the somehow inalienable presence of the literal personification of the notion of hell being other people. The hell of rigidity and acquiescence to authority and stuffy traditions and the immovable certainty of mathematics. This unity of purpose, this self-assurance and self-regard in the face of a new world order, full of endless possibility, it is all new to him. In fact, it isn’t him.

But here he is. So, he isn’t dead yet, it seems. Huh.

That’s not promising. At all.

It is extremely bad, as a matter of fact.

The cell door heaves open with a metal shudder. Pentecost enters the cell, boots slapping on the floor, sizing up this most diminutive of inter-dimensional invaders, currently the sole resident of the PPDC’s only detention cell, strapped to the metal seat at the very center of the circular enclosure.

“Hey Newt. You gonna cooperate with us today?” Pentecost says, with some notable condescension both he—Newton—and the fathomless occupant of his mind, have come to disdain. Having anything in common with the precursors is admittedly not very good.

_Hey there Fascist McGee Junior, maybe stop subjecting my body to the primitive dehumanizing psychological torture that passes for specialized interrogation,_  he wants to say.

The Precursors speak through their prisoner’s voice, employing his capacity for inverting condescension, his habit of riling men in uniform up for the sake of it, to their perverse delight. They speak and they speak and they speak, saying much while revealing nothing. Newton, trapped in his own mind, flung around helplessly in its expansive nothingness, cannot help but envision apocalyptic thoughts. He thinks of a great monstrous hand splitting his skin, pulling his guts out, swapping its contents for something blue and shimmering and pulsating and alien.

It’s a dynamic plays much like a game of Go, performed repeatedly, on an interminable scale, at high speed. Claim the most territory on a single plane, strategically, expeditiously, with acute logic and self-assured intuition. One guy versus an infinitely vast monolithic alien consciousness unconfined by the bounds of time or material circumstance or identity. And Newton is losing. He is repeatedly losing. And he is bargaining and failing to bargain. Then again trade is something he never quite had a handle on. Makes sense, what with that history of endlessly chasing after funding, a chase that eventually pushed him into the veritable theater of the PPDC. 

Newton’s voice speaks. “Did you know that the fluid dynamics of collective, uniform, sustained motion from something as minuscule as krill, as diaphanous as jellyfish, could generate turbulence with the same magnitude as monsoonal winds?” It says. "It's interesting, isn't it?"

That’s his voice they’re appropriating. His tone and parlance. His mental capacities and memories. And he is allowing it to happen. Or, at least, his inability to take hold of his own body might as well make that the case. 

Pentecost shakes his head. “What’s your point? Is the fish why you’re so dead set on the real estate?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

They speak and they speak and they speak and Newton, trapped behind walls metaphysical and metaphorical, exerts the full force of his being he can possibly bring to bear, pressurizing the standpipe of his cognitive motor functions to the point of overflowing. Pentecost leaves the room once more, and in the most inconvenient and inappropriate of tangents, Mercury and Bowie begin to perform. Superficially they are here in this solitary cell, but in actuality somewhere in the deepest hollows of his mind, in some demonic subversion of Heliconian delirium. The same bass riff, the same two-chord step, the same two words, nearly a whisper ad infinitum.

_Under pressure. Under pressure. Under pressure._  

A lifetime ago people found it difficult to coax him out, from under a table, from behind a corner, from the confines of his room. _Buddy, it’s okay. Hey kid, it’s just me. Newt, hey Newt, it’s all right, it’s going to be all right, you can come out now._ And look at him now, combing every last corner of the intricate topology of his mind, looking for hidden seals to crack, he wants to break free, and now Freddie is at it again, goddamn it, and if he keeps it up Newt might end up resenting Queen for the rest of his hopefully brief life.

Funny how he used to lament the limitations of any consciousness trapped in the carbon-based ephemera that is the human body, with its genetically-dictated constraints tethering its hypothetically limitless potential to the boundaries of material circumstance. Or, well, actually given the endlessly replicating exobiotic consciousness trapped in his body, perhaps there’s a silver lining. He can take the kaiju and the Precursors down with him. That’s something. All he has to do is ask somebody here to do some expeditious executing.

Not that he would sanction execution but this, of course, is a special case.

However there is some dubiousness to the finality of his proposed solution. For one, who is to say he hasn’t already laid all the necessary pieces for a failsafe, should the second attempt at invasion fail?

And then there is, of course, the simple fact that he does not want to die. He has had ample time to contemplate the notion of finality since Trespasser laid waste to the coast of San Francisco. Yet in the face of its necessity—well, possible, highly likely but not completely unequivocally certain necessity—something in him begins to falter. He’s going to die eventually. But the idea of ending it all when the last ten years of his life have not been his to live feels exceptionally appalling. It’s just plain sad is what it is. Disappointing, on his part.

They move him to another cell, pitted and grimy and significantly smaller, but one with a bed, a sink and toilet, and a small metal chair into which he immediately drops. Instinctively he would have either headed directly for the bed or bashed his face into the sink so at least it feels like there is some compromise going on here, superficially. The chair could be some halfway point, in some convoluted way.

The cell is, notably, not hermetically sealed, unlike the last one. Not that he is contemplating escape. Just lamenting the cliché metal bars. Or, well, the in vogue holding cell style favors bulletproof glass walls, but whatever. It doesn't matter. He's trapped either way. In the cell, in his own body, in his own brain.

Five days of isolation, measured in cups of water received and what passes for food, and he might be losing it. Which is kind of pathetic, except he’s never considered himself a man of physical fortitude. Here lies Newton Geiszler, forever locked in the circuitous contemplation of self-annihilation coming to grips with his surprisingly resolute drive to self-preservation.

He considers the possibility of bargaining with the multiple consciousnesses in his mind to relay information, ostensibly, for trade-offs. Like better food, for one. Enough vodka to trigger alcohol poisoning. Possibly a harmonica. He would actually _like_  to relay pertinent information, not just for self-preservation, but for the eventual perpetuation of all life on Earth, and consequently his own survival, so really it all circles back to saving his ass, but the point is he would rather not be doing what he has been doing. That is, being an uncooperative asshole entirely in the style of Newton Geiszler pre-Precursor possession.

The end of the hall rattles. He hears the staccato patter of three feet to one body. More precisely, two feet and a cane. Somewhere in the archipelagic scatter of Newton’s disassembled mind, a lone island rises from the water to rejoice. He's not entirely sure if that's him or the kaiju rejoicing.


End file.
